Re: minor interactive rebase regression: HEAD points to wrong commit while rewording

[Phillip Wood <phillip.wood123@gmail.com>]

On 12/08/2019 18:50, SZEDER Gábor wrote:
> 
> When running interactive rebase to reword a commit message, I would
> expect that the commit whose message I'm rewording is checked out.
> This is not quite the case when rewording multiple subsequent commit
> messages.
> 
> Let's start with four commits, and start an interactive rebase from
> the first commit:
> 
>    $ git log --oneline
>    5835aa1 (HEAD -> master) fourth
>    64ecc64 third
>    d5fad83 second
>    384b86f first
>    $ git rebase -i 384b86f
> 
> Update the instruction sheet to edit the log messages of two
> subsequent commits:
> 
>    r d5fad83 second
>    r 64ecc64 third
>    pick 5835aa1 fourth
> 
> Now, after the editor opens up the second commit's log message, start
> a new terminal and check where HEAD is pointing to:
> 
>    ~/tmp/reword (master|REBASE-i 1/3)$ head -n1 .git/COMMIT_EDITMSG
>    second
>    ~/tmp/reword (master|REBASE-i 1/3)$ git log --oneline -1
>    d5fad83 (HEAD) second
> 
> So far so good.

Because the sequencer can fast-forwarded to second from first it does 
that and then run 'commit --amend' to do the reword.

> Save the updated commit message, and after the editor opens up the
> third commit's log message, check again where HEAD is pointing to now:
> 
>    ~/tmp/reword (master +|REBASE-i 2/3)$ head -n1 .git/COMMIT_EDITMSG
>    third
>    ~/tmp/reword (master +|REBASE-i 2/3)$ git log --oneline -1
>    c3db735 (HEAD) second - updated

As second has been updated the sequencer cannot fast-forward to third so 
it cherry-picks third and then passes --edit when it runs 'git commit' 
to commit the cherry-pick. HEAD is updated once the reworded commit has 
been created.

I think the scripted rebase always ran cherry-pick and then ran 'commit 
--amend' afterwards if the commit was being reworded. The C 
implementation is more efficient as it avoids creating an redundant 
commit but has the side effect that HEAD is not updated before the 
reword which was surprising here.

I don't think I've ever looked at HEAD while rewording, my shell prompt 
gets the current pick from .git/rebase-merge/done so does not look at 
HEAD. While it might seem odd if the user looks at HEAD it's quite nice 
not to create a new commit only to amend it straight away when it's 
reworded. We have REBASE_HEAD which always points to the current pick - 
HEAD is also an unreliable indicator of the current pick if there are 
conflicts.

Best Wishes

Phillip

> As you can see, HEAD still points to the (now rewritten) second
> commit.
> 
> It's only HEAD, though: notice the '+' in the git prompt, indicating
> that both the worktree and index are dirty.  And indeed, they both
> already match the state of the currently reworded, i.e. third, commit:
> 
>    ~/tmp/reword (master +|REBASE-i 2/3)$ cat file
>    third
> 
> This is good, because even though HEAD has not been updated yet, it
> already allows users to take a look at the "big picture", i.e. actual
> file contents, in case the diff included in the commit message
> template doesn't show enough context.
> 
> This behavior changed in commit 18633e1a22 (rebase -i: use the
> rebase--helper builtin, 2017-02-09); prior to that HEAD pointed to the
> third commit while editing its log message.
> 
> It's important to reword subsequent commits.  When rewording multiple,
> but non subsequent commits (e.g. reword, pick, reword in the
> instruction sheet), then HEAD is pointing to the right commits during
> both rewords.
> 
>